China retains fastest supercomputer crown
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China's Tianhe-2 has once again topped the list of the world's fastest supercomputers, with a performance of 33.86petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark.
Tianhe-2 - which translates as Milky Way 2 - was developed by the National University of Defence Technology in Guangzhou.
It has 16,000 nodes, each with two Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors, for a combined total of 3,120,000 computing cores.
Tianhe-2 seized the number one ranking from Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan supercomputer in June this year.
Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, remains the No. 2 system after achieving 17.59Pflop/s on the Linpack benchmark. It is also said to be one of the most energy efficient systems on the list, consuming a total of 8.21MW and delivering 2.143gigaflops/W.
The only new entry near the top of the leader board was Piz Daint, a Cray XC30 system installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano, Switzerland.
Piz Daint achieved 6.27Pflop/s on the Linpack benchmark, putting it in 6th place and making it the most powerful system in Europe.
